Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.
The mixed martial arts champion offers guidance like a particularly intense version of Dr. Phil.
Two-time Olympian “Rowdy” Rousey, who was the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo (in Beijing in 2008), is a titleholder and pioneer in MMA, a full-contact combat sport that is rapidly gaining in popularity. Yet, despite her fearsome image and dominance in the arena, she tells readers on Page 1, "I am vulnerable; that's why I fight." Throughout the book, the author’s writing reveals her fighter's mentality. In the chapter "Pain Is Just One Piece of Information,” she urges readers not "to allow pain to dictate [your] decision-making" and tells the shocking story of how she once popped her dislocated elbow back into place during a match—and before the end of the round. Though her statement “when I lose, I mourn a piece of me dying" might seem like an overstatement, it reflects the intense passion (a major motif throughout) and self-applied pressure that make her a champion. Similar, but tamer, adages appear in dozens of business and self-help books, but Rousey offers them in her take-no-prisoners style. Her experiences and storytelling are engrossing and entertaining, but her narration loses steam as the book progresses and she shifts focus from tough-talk adages and encouragement ("To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it”) to recaps of each of her professional MMA battles. The book is just too long; it could have been more than 50 pages shorter, and Rousey would still have inspired her readers. But her warrior mentality is always evident, and one of her more helpful pieces of advice is to feel angry, not sad, after a loss. She urges would-be elite athletes—and really, anyone—to set goals, then become obsessed with elevating them.
Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-26-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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